Comments

For example, take the current patch series to add aix/ppc64 support. This patch series includes many trivial changes like https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/164014/3 (1-line change to a test file), but 4 reviewers were added, and another 4 CC'd. Many other CLs have an equally large number of reviewers/CCs.

I was added to a bunch of the CLs, but I've basically been ignoring them since I saw @ianlancetaylor and @bcmills were reviewing some of them. Maybe I should take a closer look at some, but the false positive rate is high enough that I'd probably miss if they specifically asked me for help.

Basically, I'm worried that this is leading to the bystander effect, where Gopherbot is adding reviewers to ensure new contributors' CLs don't go ignored. But then all of the reviewers assume another reviewer will look at it, thereby yielding the same result.

It also leads to situations where I upload a CL for trybot testing, and it gets mailed out to a dozen reviewers, and I have to then remove them all.

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As a concrete alternative, I suggest gopherbot pick only one of the reviewers to automatically add to the CL, but that it includes in a comment other possible reviewers. I expect this would mitigate the bystander effect, increase the signal-to-noise ratio of review request emails, and still provide an easy escalation path for CL authors when a reviewer isn't responsive.

This comment has been minimized.

edited

I sent a CL to address gopherbot's over-aggressiveness in general, but note that it wouldn't have helped for the particular example here.

There are eight(!) owners listed in dev.golang.org/owners for go/src/runtime: four primaries (@aclements, @rsc, @RLH, and @randall77), and four secondaries, and no obvious way for a contributor (casual or otherwise) or a bot to determine which of those owners to choose as the primary reviewer review. (Note that gopherbot already introduces an intentional delay before assigning reviewers: if you know who should review the CL, you should add them preemptively when you upload it.)

In general, I think we should probably have no more than two primary owners for a given component, and those owners can choose to route the incoming reviews however they see fit (by adding or removing reviewers as necessary).